Show HN: I built an interactive visual playground for interaction nets

Hi HN!

I built a tool to make it easy to explore interaction nets visually in the browser.

Interaction nets are a model of computation based on local graph rewriting. They allow for deterministic, massively parallel evaluation without the variable-binding overhead of traditional lambda calculus.

I've been thinking about interaction nets for a while and realised that I just didn't have a good intuition for them. I found it hard to visualise how they worked, what sorts of programs you can express with them, what shape those programs take, and what executing programs actually feels like in practice.

This lets you explore all of these with what is hopefully an intuitive UX. Both desktop and mobile are supported.

You can explore untyped, typed, and polarised interaction nets. You can either turn types and polarity off, make them optional, or require them. Turning types/polarities on restricts which agents' ports can be wired together, and thus reduces the number of interaction rules you need to account for.

A number of examples are included so you can start exploring some interesting computations right away.

Playground: https://netties.adler.dev GitHub: https://github.com/Arrow7000/netties

I'd love feedback on usability and if there are any other features or example nets you'd like to see.